LABOR: The Engine Inside the Hood

Decked out in the latest in ventilated sports shoes, straw hats with
foulard bands, tailored silk suits and open-weave summer shirts, a band
of 13 men mushed across the thick carpet in the lobby of Los Angeles'
flossy Sheraton-Town House Hotel last week for a three-day meeting.

They planned one day to meet on a palm-shaded lanai in sight of the
swimming pool and then, to avoid nosy newsmen, switched with their
retinue (five lawyers), like French-farce husbands, from the Atwater
Kent Suite to the Mary Martin Suite to the parquet-floored Terrace
Room. They looked and acted like directors of General Motors come to
dream about new models, but they were the General Executive Board of
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters trying to work their way
out of trouble.

Facing these powerful barons of transportation were charges by the
Ethical Practices Committee of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that might get their
whole brotherhood thrown out of the big union. The
heart of their problem was best illustrated by the fouled sparkplugs
brought along by the four biggest of them: bellowing Dave Beck, newly
harassed (he cried) by some absurd vendetta of the income tax people;
Minneapolis Teamster Vice President Sidney L. Brennan, convicted of
accepting a bribe; Western Conference Chair man Frank Brewster,
convicted of contempt of Congress; and, with topmost billing in the
news, James Riddle Hoffa, chairman of the Central States Conference of
Teamsters, struggling to keep his tail gate from the teeth of the law.

For the first three, there was little to look forward to; for big things
in union labor, they were through. But tough, ruthless Jimmy Hoffa was
getting ready to take the big step to ultimate power among the
Teamsters. His mouth hardened into a grim line; his accustomed
arrogance softened to a lighter hauteur; he stiffened his muscle-packed
(5 ft. 5½ in., 170 lb.) frame and snapped: "I have been as clean as
anybody else in the labor movement. What I have done was in keeping
with the membership's authority vested in me."

Only a prefix away from the international union's presidency, Vice
President Hoffa, 44, controls a mighty voting force which he has
assembled through the years by tirelessly reaching out from his Detroit
headquarters into every accessible Teamster domain, tirelessly wooing
business agents and local leaders, establishing a machine which owes
allegiance only to Hoffa. He maintained it by virtue of his famed
reputation as a tough negotiator of union contracts and a self-styled
protector of the ranks. While conspiring with hoods, he has won the
confidence of businessmen and has even assumed a stance of labor
statesmanship.

"I do not like irresponsible labor leaders," he cried before the St.
Louis Advertising Club last year. "Within the Teamsters international
union . . . we have no room for dishonest people." As a guest lecturer at
Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration last year, he
lectured Economist Sumner Slichter's class on the economics of
collective bargaining.

Bites of Coal. For Jimmy Hoffa the Terrace Room of the Town House, the
leadership of 1,400,000 Teamsters and the classroom at Harvard
represent a long, hard climb. He fought every step of the way.